Fictional Deceptions: Using Deception to Baffle, Surprise and Entertain Your Audience

Fictional Deceptions:

Using Deception to Baffle, Surprise and Entertain Your Audience

by

K. Scot Macdonald

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2017 K. Scot Macdonald

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Macdonald, K. Scot

Fictional Deceptions/K. Scot Macdonald—1st Edition

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-9916653-8-9

Kerrera House Press

Culver City, CA

www.KerreraHousePress.com

First Printing: 2017

Printed in the United States of America

Mundas Vult Decipi

The world wishes to be deceived.

To Dad,

Neil William Macdonald,

who loved a good mystery, real or imagined, as long as it was deceptive.

Thanks for all the long talks.

And to Kira,

Thanks for the title.

Spoiler Warning

To analyze the use of deception in fiction, I describe how writers use deception to surprise and entertain their audiences. My analysis gives away key plot points in the movies, novels, plays and television shows mentioned in this book. While this may decrease the enjoyment you’ll derive from reading the novels or watching the plays, television and movies, it will allow you to learn how you can use the principles and techniques of deception in your own stories to mislead, surprise and entertain your readers and audience.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Deception in All Fiction

Chapter 2: Spies, Generals, Conmen, Magicians, and You: Masters of Deception

Part I: The 7 Principles of Deception

Chapter 3: Principle 1: No Defense

Chapter 4: Principle 2: Protect the Truth with a Bodyguard of Lies

Chapter 5: Principle 3: Cover Stories as Realistic, Interesting and Hidden as the Real Story

Chapter 6: Principle 4: Base Deception on the Truth, Not Lies

Chapter 7: Principle 5: Give Readers a Choice

Chapter 8: Principle 6: Dole Out Clues Slowly and Late

Chapter 9: Principle 7: The Longer the Cover Story, the Greater the Surprise

Part II: The 10 Techniques of Deception

Chapter 10: Technique 1: Framing

Chapter 11: Technique 2: Dazzle

Chapter 12: Technique 3: Conditioning

Chapter 13: Technique 4: Break the Rules

Chapter 14: Technique 5: Manipulate Time

Chapter 15: Technique 6: Red Herrings

Chapter 16: Technique 7: Camouflage and Disguises

Chapter 17: Technique 8: Use Characters to Deceive

Chapter 18: Technique 9: Deceptive Storytelling

Chapter 19: Technique 10: Nesting: Putting it All Together

Chapter 20: Solving the Mystery: Detecting the Real Story

Chapter 21: Perfecting Deception: Feedback

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

About Kerrera House Press

Other Books by K. Scot Macdonald

Chapter 1: Deception in All Fiction

Deception is the act of trying to make someone believe that something that is false is true, or that something that is true is false. Few things are 100 percent true or false, so the deceiver often tries to convince the target that something that is partially true is completely true or that something that is completely false contains a kernel of truth.

Of all genres, mysteries rely the most on deception. To write a mystery, you must deceive the reader. As mystery author Sue Grafton wrote, Mystery writers are the magicians of fiction. We’re the illusionists, working with sleight of hand in the performance of our art. The goal of a mystery story is to deceive readers and surprise the audience at the end; She was the murderer? A mystery without deception is not a mystery. It is just the recitation of a crime with no plot twists, no surprises and, probably, no readers. To succeed, a mystery author must learn how to deceive readers. Therefore, this book focuses on the use of deception in mysteries, although with examples from every genre.

In one sense, since the goal of all fiction is to make the reader or audience believe that something imagined is real, deception is at the heart of all fiction, regardless of the genre or medium. Readers and audiences want to believe that the fictional world in the novel or on the screen is real. When London newspapers published obituaries for Sherlock Holmes and thousands write Holmes every year at 221b Baker Street, it shows that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deception succeeded in making readers believe the fictional Holmes was real. When Hercule Poirot’s obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 6, 1975, it showed that Agatha Christie had succeeded in making the world believe her fictional detective really existed. When audiences anguish over the fates of David Copperfield, Scarlett O’Hara, Bilbo Baggins, Jon Snow (Game of Thrones), Bridget Jones, or Glenn Rhee (The Walking Dead), they show how the writers of those novels and shows have created real characters in real worlds for their audiences.

Since deception is used in all fiction, the lessons from this book are applicable to all fiction whatever the genre or medium. Mysteries, action-adventure, crime, horror, conspiracy, and thriller novels and movies are predominantly based on deception, while dramas, love stories, comedies, and literary works must include some deception to surprise and thereby entertain the audience. Without deception, all novels, plays and movies fall flat, lacking suspense and the twists and turns that transform a pedestrian story into a tale that engages readers and makes them believe a fictional world is real. Life is full of surprises, so your fictional worlds must also be full of surprises, and deception is crucial to creating surprises. Deception has been called the midwife of surprise. In 68 major battles between 1914 and 1967, without deception, surprise was only achieved about half the time. Just as military commanders seek to surprise their enemies on the battlefield, writers try to surprise their audience, since a surprised audience is an entertained audience.

Every artist must know the principles and techniques of their craft in order to create great art. Even though Picasso created abstract cubist masterpieces, as Alfred Hitchcock said, Picasso knows every muscle in the human body. If you ask him to draw the figure of a man or woman, there wouldn’t be a muscle out of place. You’ve got to know your craft in order to express the art. Fiction is based on deception, so you must know the craft of deception embodied in its principles and techniques to create compelling art in the form of fictional stories. Learning a deceptive trick or two will allow you to craft a workmanlike mystery or thriller, but learning the principles of deception will allow you to understand how to use different deceptive techniques in particular situations, as well as the effect of each technique on an audience. Such knowledge will help you write a series of mystery novels applying the principles and techniques of deception in surprisingly different ways in each novel to build an audience of millions or to write a blockbuster movie franchise to deceive and entertain a global audience of moviegoers.

Few writers truly understand or even consciously know how they achieve surprise based on deception in their stories, let alone to the extent required to explain their machinations simply and clearly to other writers. As with the finest athletes, often the finest writers make the worst teachers. What comes naturally and almost without thinking to the gifted author requires extensive thought and practice for everyone else.

Books on writing detective fiction or mysteries offer general guidelines for building suspense and hiding clues, but no book on writing focuses on the techniques, let alone the principles, authors use to deceive readers. Some books mention a gimmick or two, but none thoroughly discuss the techniques authors use to create mysteries, let alone how deception is used in other genres or mediums.

Where’s a law abiding, morally upstanding writer to turn for lessons on the principles of deception, the fine art of misdirection, and the ins and outs of obfuscation? From these very pages. Let me show you how the masters of deception in the worlds of spies, warfare, con games, magic, and fiction use the principles and techniques of deception to deceive, surprise and entertain their adversaries, marks, and audiences—and how you can, too.

Chapter 2: Spies, Generals, Conmen, Magicians, and You: Masters of Deception

When most people hear the term deception, their mind is instantly filled with images of nefarious double agents, spies in disguises and clever ruses devised by never-photographed spymasters. Deception is at the core of espionage work. Double agents deceive their colleagues for years while working for their country’s enemy. Intelligence services stage fake attacks on their own troops to lend credibility to fake anti-government guerrillas. Spies misrepresent themselves as serving one nation to convince individuals to work for them, such as when East German agents during the Cold War posed as anti-nuclear activists to woo West German women and convince them to steal government secrets. Trust no one is an axiom from the world of spies that epitomizes the central role of deception in the life of a spy.

While deception is at the core of the cloak and dagger world of spies, most people don’t realize that deception is also crucial in warfare. As Sun Tzu, a 6th century BC Chinese general, wrote, All warfare is based on deception. Deceiving your adversary about where, when and how you will attack is the key to victory on the battlefield. The Trojan Horse may be one of history’s most famous battlefield deceptions, but deception has played a prominent role throughout military history. In 1066 at Hastings, William’s troops feigned a retreat to lure King Harold’s men out of their strong and as yet unbroken shield wall. Believing the Normans had broken, Harold’s men charged after the Normans, who turned and hacked them to pieces, turning William into The Conqueror and England into a Norman kingdom. The British in World War II were masters of deception, creating a bodyguard of lies to deceive the Germans about the timing and location of the D-Day landings. In 1973 the Egyptians deceived the Israelis into believing that the movement of Egyptian troops up to the Suez Canal was another in a long series of exercises. The Israelis decided not to mobilize until it was almost too late and the Egyptians crossed the canal, seized part of the Sinai Peninsula and almost won the Yom Kippur War.

Conmen are masters of deception. You receive a letter in the mail. The sender predicts that the Chicago Bears will defeat the Green Bay Packers this Sunday. On Sunday, the Bears win. Wednesday a second letter arrives, predicting that the Seahawks will defeat the Colts next Sunday. You decide to take a flutter as the British say. You bet $10 in the office pool on the Seahawks. Again, the letter writer is right and you win a tidy sum. A third letter arrives Wednesday predicting victory for the underdog Giants against the Patriots. Deciding to trust the apparently perfect predictive abilities of the letter writer, you put $50 on the Giants. Again, they win. Amazing. A fourth letter arrives Wednesday, but with no prediction. Just wire him $1,000 and the writer will send you his infallible system. Riches are within your grasp and the system is proven. It is three for three. You write the $1,000. You never hear from the letter writer again. What happened? A conman sent 60 letters to 60 different homes; 30 predicting victory for the Bears and 30 victory for the Packers. The second week, the conman sent letters to the 30 Bears-victory recipients, 15 predicting victory for the Seahawks, 15 for the Colts. Liking the Giants more than the Patriots, a week later the conman sends 8 letters predicting a Giants’ victory and 7 a Patriots’ win to the winners of the previous week. Then the 8 lucky three-time winners receive the offer to buy the system. Three wire the money. The conman just made $3,000 tax free for printing just over 100 letters and the price of some postage, unless he’s a modern conman and uses email. A criminal deception operation has successfully been conducted. All con games rely on deception in one form or another, from turning odometers back on used cars to making the basketball hoops slightly smaller on the midway when you attempt to win your girlfriend that adorable stuffed bear.

Like spies, generals and conmen, magicians are masters of deception. They make rabbits appear from empty hats, saw assistants in half and, as David Copperfield did in 1983, make the Statue of Liberty disappear. The empty hat has a hidden compartment, the assistant’s legs are nowhere near the saw, and the Statue of Liberty is still there and has been continuously since 1886. Magic always involves surprise and magicians always base surprise on deception.

You might think as a law-abiding, morally upstanding individual who has never run an espionage operation, attempted to deceive a rival general, or obtain cash in a con game from a mark that you are ill suited to employ deception in your stories. You underrate your abilities. You probably already use deception in your everyday life without realizing it. As Leonardo Da Vinci concluded in his Notebook, Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. Do you tell your spouse they look great even when they’re having the hair day from hell? Do you agree that the boss’s proposal is brilliant, even when you think it is moronic? Do you dress up for a date or job interview? Are you on your best behavior during the date or job interview? In fact, we are almost always attempting to manage the impressions we make on others, whether at home, work or play, which are all forms of deception.

You probably even attempt to deceive adversaries. Do you leave lights on in your house when you go out to convince burglars to burgle elsewhere? If you do, then you have practiced deception based on the principle of using the truth to deceive an adversary (See Chapter 6). The information—that the lights are on—is true. The conclusion the burglar draws is false: that you are home. As long as your house is not burglarized, you have conducted a successful deception operation.

At work, you may deceive your boss by working at your computer every minute of every workday. If your boss believes you’re a hard worker, then you have deceived your target by using facts. You do work hard. The conclusion he draws that you’re hard at work on the next mind-numbing yearly report is false. You’re really working hard on your next deceptively gripping novel.

Applying deception to your writing involves recognizing the principles and techniques of deception, and applying that knowledge, which you already use every day, to your novel, play or script. Once you learn how, using deception effectively is relatively easy in the real world and in your fictional stories. Why? Because there is no defense against deception.

Part I: The 7 Principles of Deception

Chapter 3

Principle 1: No Defense

Once you understand the principles and techniques, deception is remarkably effective in the real world and in the fictional worlds you create. The available evidence (spies are a secretive lot) strongly suggests that in the real world all forms of deception are extremely, even extraordinarily, effective, even when the stakes are the fate of nations. Barton Whaley in Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War composed a 600-page appendix listing all of the known twentieth century military deceptions. How many succeeded? Almost all.

The key to the success of deception is the fact that humans cannot learn not to be deceived. As one deception expert, J. Barton Bowyer, concluded, There is no apparent defense against trickery, any more than the human eye can turn a movie into frozen frames or make the stick in the water look straight….There seems to be little hope of detecting deception. The trained and innocent are duped. A magician can still deceive their audience when the audience knows the magician is trying to deceive them and even when the audience are themselves magicians and experts at deception. In the 1920s, the American master magician Dr. Harlan Tarbell and 11 colleagues attended a play, The Charlatan, starring Frederick Tilden as Count Cagliostro, an 18th century alchemist. The magicians were amused by the many simple tricks Tilden used in the play. Then the villain, a lawyer, forces Cagliostro to either back down in disgrace or accept a challenge to test his skills as a magician publicly. Cagliostro accepts and in full view of the villain and several skeptics displays a handful of sand, a clear glass flowerpot, a tall paper cone, and a seed. The lawyer inspects each prop, showing them to the audience to verify they are as they seem to be and are otherwise empty. Cagliostro pours the sand into the pot, plants the seed in it, covers it with the cone and steps back. The lawyer rudely intervenes by checking under the cone to verify he has not been tricked. Then Cagliostro steps forward and confounds his enemy and the audience by raising the magic cone to reveal a full-grown rose bush. The audience applauded, but the magicians in the audience were amazed. They knew the trick, an old one called the Indian Mango Tree, yet none of them could figure out how the trick had been done. Usually a confederate covertly passes the rose bush to the conjurer or the container is rigged to allow the rose bush to be hidden in it. The magicians thought Tilden had devised a new way to perform the trick. After the show, Tilden explained he was just an actor and knew of no new way of performing the trick. Tilden simply had the lawyer, when he checked that the cone was empty, add the rose bush. The magicians failed to catch on that Cagliostro’s archenemy had been his confederate. By buying into the play’s story, the magicians had failed to detect the deception, a hopeful story for those attempting to deceive an audience or readers.

Your task as an author or screenwriter is made infinitely easier because it is extremely difficult to perceive reality accurately. Looked at in a certain way, almost all of psychology deals with deception. Studies of perception analyze how we perceive the world, yet almost all such studies find that humans rarely perceive reality accurately with any of our five senses. We see that a stick bends as it enters a pool of water even when we know it is not really bent. CDs sample music, leaving out bits, yet our brains fill in the missing parts to make the music sound better than an LP. Eyewitness accounts and descriptions of criminals are almost universally inaccurate. We even err in perceiving ourselves, leading the great Scottish poet Robbie Burns to plead for the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

An old saw states fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. But it is a comforting myth to believe that you can’t deceive someone repeatedly with the same deceptive principle or technique even in the real world where the stakes are men’s lives. All that is required is to offer a choice. The military call it the principle of alternative goals. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 drive to Atlanta during the US Civil War is a classic example of a serial deception. Sherman’s supplies were tied to a single railway and he had to attack along that railway. The Confederates knew this fact, yet in every attack, save one at Kennesaw Mountain, where there was little room to attack on either side of the railway and Sherman had to frontally assault the Confederates, Sherman surprised the Southerners. Sherman had the left/right option and he used it to repeatedly deceive the Confederates about which side of the railway he would attack along.

The same principle applies to fiction: offer the audience at least two alternatives and there is an excellent chance they will repeatedly choose the wrong alternative or at the least be far from certain which option is the truth. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell repeatedly deceives the reader about whether Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are going to be together, as Scarlett pursue Ashley Wilkes, marries Charles Hamilton and then Frank Kennedy, until finally marrying Rhett, before he leaves her. Repeated choice leads to repeated deception and repeated surprises for readers.

Even using the same techniques, authors can repeatedly deceive readers. Agatha Christie sometimes used the same deceptive techniques to surprise and entertain readers. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot's (and Christie’s) first mystery, everyone suspects Alfred Inglethorp of murdering his older, wealthy wife, but early in the story Poirot clears him. At the end of the story, however, Poirot unmasks Inglethorp as the murderer. Inglethorp framed himself at first with weak evidence in order to be cleared as a suspect. Christie used the same deceptive technique in her first Miss Marple novel, Murder at the Vicarage. When Colonel Protheroe is murdered, his wife and her lover are the first to be suspected. Miss Marple clears them, only at the end to deduce that they framed themselves and are indeed the murderers. Both novels were well received and sold well.

One exception to the rule that deception invariably succeeds is when the target is very young children, who are difficult and even sometimes impossible to deceive. This fact explains why true mystery stories are never written for the very young. Young children will not follow a fake or feint because they perceive the world literally and only react to reality. For deception to be effective, the target must be smart enough to fashion the desired false reality. If an individual is too inattentive, naïve or literal, they fail to create the false reality and are not deceived. As the American comedian Joe Penner said, You can’t fool me; I’m too ignorant. Some authors recognize this fact. Harry Kemelman in Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out has a simple young man, Billy realize that the apparently random shots the murderer fired around the room in which the murder occurred are not random. Billy doesn’t see the deception and realizes that each shot is purposefully placed: in the center of a clock, the finial on a lamp, a pill bottle, and the mouth on a picture. The key shot amongst the dazzle (Chapter 11) or noise of many shots was the one that stopped the clock, thereby establishing the killer’s alibi. The murderer set the clock back before shooting it. Rabbi Small, who at first is deceived, concludes, I suppose it shows that it takes age and experience and the wisdom of maturity to be fooled.

In one respect, the more intelligent the target, the easier they are to deceive, in that they will quickly follow the feint or misdirection. Even so, the intelligent target is not the best target for deception. Ironically, the best targets are those who are deceitful, since the individuals most likely to be deceived need to have at least a sliver of the belief or idea the deceiver wants to